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<h1>CIMA FRDL Help</h1>

This flight recorder downloader is designed to be simple
and idiot proof to use in the heat of running a Microlight or
Paramotor championship.

<h2>A little bit of history</h2>

Whilst the gliding community had been using loggers since
the mid-1990's, they were specialist devices, very expensive, and generally
displayed at least some navigational information.  In practice, the rules for
microlights and Paramotors were originally written around the first device to
become available which was reasonably priced and more-or-less met the basic
requirement.  This was the <a
href="http://www.flymicro.com/fr/index.cfm?page=General%2FHome">MLR SP24-XC</a>
which is a normal hand-held GPS with firmware modified by the manufacturer so
it only displays GPS time, number of satellites in view, and battery and memory
status.  There are two <a
href="http://www.flymicro.com/fr/index.cfm?page=Software%2FMLR%20firmware">firmware
variants</a>; 2 sec logging and 5 sec logging, which with a memory for 8000
fixes gives an endurance of 4h 26 min or 11h 6 min.</p>

<p>The talented Spaniard, Jose Luis Esteban designed and wrote
a MLR download software which has been demonstrated many times to be an
essential part of the championship organizer's armoury.</p>

<p>The MLR has some significant faults, but in general has
proven to be robust and reliable.  Unfortunately however, not long after it
came into use, MLR were taken over by another company who discontinued the
SP24-XC, and today it is impossible to find. Only one other type, made by Air
Observer in South Africa, has become available since 2003 but it is not very
cheap. It is the responsibility of teams or pilots to supply their own loggers,
but with such limited availability they often don't have them. Championships
have been saved more than once by FFPlUM, the French microlight federation, who
bought a substantial quantity of MLR's and often lend their spare ones to
pilots.  </p>

<p>With so many cheap GPS loggers available today, you might be
wondering why there aren't other types in use.  The answer is quite simple; the
hardware requirement in the specification is only half the story.  The other
half is in reliably and quickly getting the data out of them in a useful
format.</p>
<A NAME="test"></A>
<p>In 2008, a new genre of loggers have begun to appear which
are sometimes described as 'photo loggers'.  They are intended to be used to
record a fix every second whilst you are out and about taking photographs, and
then when you get home, a special software is used to match the times in the
track with the times of the photos to effectively 'geolocate' the photos you
took.  </p>

<p>The point about these devices is that they often record
their tracks to a SD card, or to on-board memory which in either case appears
to the host computer as just another hard drive in exactly the same way as a standard
memory stick does. </p>


<p>This CIMA FRDL attempts to solve the problem by downloading these devices
quickly and easily into a CIMA specification .igc file.</p>


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